The Geography Blog focusing on all things geography: human, physical, technical, space, news, and geopolitics. Also known as Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze!
Written by a former National Geographic employee who also proudly served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

GeoThentic: The Useful Geography Eduation Tool

When National Geographic released their Geo-Literacy videos I did a rebuttal video showing how geographers should emphasizes how geographic thinking is a marketable and useful skill for a wide set of real world problems.

I received positive feedback from many readers as well as questions as to why National Geographic does not do something similar. Well, apparently National Geographic is involved with something incredibly useful (though none of my teacher contacts knew about it). GeoThentic is a joint project between the University of Minnesota and National Geographic which uses real world-like scenarios to introduce geographic thinking and geosptial tools. The program is free for teachers to register and use.

Currently, the software offers five modules: Build a Hospital, Global
Climate Change, Avian Flu, Build a Stadium and Population Density.
Within these modules, students play the role of a geographer, taking
advantage of various digital resources and data to determine, for
instance, where the best place is in San Francisco to build a hospital,
or which U.S. states will be most impacted by population growth and
decline by the year 2100.

This is the type of examples the public wants to see on why geography matters. Now if only National Geographic would tell people about it.